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Blue Tail Fly
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- "Jimmy Crack Corn" redirects here. For the song by Eminem, see Jimmy Crack Corn (song).
"Blue Tail Fly", "De Blue Tail Fly", or "Jimmy Crack Corn" is a blackface minstrel song, first performed in the United States in the 1840s, which remains a popular children's song today.
Over the years, many variants of text have appeared, but the basic narrative remains intact. On the surface, the song is a black slave's lament over his master's death.
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Encyclopedia
- "Jimmy Crack Corn" redirects here. For the song by Eminem, see Jimmy Crack Corn (song).
"Blue Tail Fly", "De Blue Tail Fly", or "Jimmy Crack Corn" is a blackface minstrel song, first performed in the United States in the 1840s, which remains a popular children's song today.
Over the years, many variants of text have appeared, but the basic narrative remains intact. On the surface, the song is a black slave's lament over his master's death. The song, however, has a subtext of rejoicing over that death, and possibly having caused it by deliberate negligence. Most versions at least nod to idiomatic African American English, though sanitized, grammatically "correct" versions predominate today.
The blue-tail fly of the song is probably a Southern variant of the horsefly, which feeds on the blood of animals such as horses and cattle, as well as humans, and thus constitutes a prevalent pest in agricultural regions. Some horseflies have a blue-black abdomen, hence the name.
Lyrics
One early version set the idyllic (yet ironic) scene thus:
- When I was young A us'd to wait
- On Massa and hand him de plate;
- Pass down the bottle when he git dry,
- And bresh away de blue tail fly.
- refrain (repeated each verse):
- Jim crack corn — I don't care,
- Jim crack corn — I don't care,
- Jim crack corn — I don't care,
- Old Massa gone away.
Two further verses show the singer being told to protect his master's horse from the bite of the blue-tail fly:
- An' when he ride in de arternoon,
- I foiler wid a hickory broom;
- De poney being berry shy,
- When bitten by de blue tail fly.
- One day he rode aroun' de farm,
- De flies so numerous dey did swarm;
- One chance to bite 'im on the thigh,
- De debble take dat blu tail fly.
The horse bucks and the master is killed. The slave then escapes culpability:
- De poney run, he jump an' pitch,
- An' tumble massa in de ditch;
- He died, an' de jury wonder'd why
- De verdic was de blue tail fly.
The reference to a "jury" and a "verdic[t]" does not indicate that the slave was charged with any crime. The writer more likely refers to a coroner's inquest into the death.
- They buried him neath the sycamore tree
- His epitaph there for to see
- "Beneath this stone I'm forced to lie
- The victim of a blue-tailed Fly."
History and interpretation
Differing sources date it from 1844 or 1846 and differ as to who wrote it; one early printing attributed it to Dan Emmett. At the time, though, it was commonplace for the recorder of a folk song to take credit. It has also been conjectured that it might not have been originally a blackface minstrel song, and might have genuine African American origins. Unlike many minstrel songs, "Blue Tail Fly" was long popular among African Americans, and was recorded by, among others, Big Bill Broonzy. A celebrated live version was recorded by Burl Ives. Another popularizer was the folk singer Pete Seeger. At the 92nd Street Y in New York City in 1993, Ives and Seeger performed the song together in what turned out to be Ives' last public performance. The song was also repeated almost in its entirety by Bugs Bunny in the Warner Bros. cartoon short Lumber Jack-Rabbit, though it is done in Bugs' trademark Brooklyn/Bronx accent.
There has been much conjecture over the meaning of "Jimmy Crack Corn and I don't care." However, in the oldest version it is "jim crack corn", and "jim crack" has always meant something cheap or shoddily built, and "corn" is an American euphemism for "corn whiskey".
From a petroleum engineer's perspective, this could simply refer to corn whiskey. "Cracking" is, in general, a process of reducing an input substance to a desired output substance ... so "cracked" corn might be corn whiskey. "Jim" could be a generic reference to the person owning the still; much as we refer to the generic "John Doe" these days.
One possibility is "gimcrack corn," cheap corn whiskey; another related theory is that it refers to "cracking" open a jug of corn whisky; another is that "crack-corn" is related to the (still-current) slang "cracker" for a rural Southern white. Another interpretation is that "crack corn" came from the old English term "crack," meaning gossip, and that "cracking corn" was a traditional Shenandoah expression for "sitting around chitchatting." Yet another, and possibly the most popular, is that the chorus refers to an overseer who, without the master, has only his bullwhip to keep the slaves in line. Most etymologists support the first interpretation, as the term "cracker" appears to predate "corncracking", and "whipcracker" has no historical backing. This suggests that the chorus means the slaves are making whiskey and celebrating.
Pete Seeger himself was said to explain the true lyric was "Gimmie cracked corn--I don't care", a reference to a form of punishment for something very bad, in which a slave's rations were reduced to cracked corn and nothing else. In this case, the author seems to have decided that even this punishment is worth it, since the master is now dead and gone. Jim crack-corn, or "Get cracked-corn", could refer to this subsistence food (corn) ration. The slave in the song is so happy that his master is dead that he does not care if he has to eat cracked corn, either because he has no one to feed him now, or because he fears he will be punished for letting the blue-tail fly get by him, which caused his master's demise.
Another interpretation holds that "jimmy" was slang for a crow and the phrase refers to crows being allowed feed in the cornfields. Normally it would be a boy's responsibility to keep crows out of the corn. The phrase "jim crow" may come from the same usage - a jimmy could be a crow.
Reference the minstrel song from the same era (1840) "Jim Along, Josey" by Edward Harper. In this case "Jim Along" probably was the equivalent of the phrase "Get a-long", which he uses in the chorus of this song "Hey, get a-long, get a-long, Josey
Hey, get a-long, Jim a-long, Jo!
Hey, get a-long, get a-long Josey,
Hey, get a-long, Jim a-long Jo!
Abraham Lincoln was an admirer calling it "that buzzing song" and it was likely he played it on his harmonica. When he was at Gettysburg he was said to have asked for it to be played.
An instrumental version of the song entitled "Beatnik Fly" was released by Johnny and the Hurricanes in 1960.
Actress Vanessa Redgrave sings "Jimmy Cracked Corn"/"Blue Tail Fly" in one of the opening scenes to the Merchant/Ivory film of Edward Albee's adaptation of Carson McCullers' The Ballad of the Sad Cafe. It is used in direct juxtaposition to the spiritual "In the Garden" to emphasize Miss Amelia's non-religious concerns (as compared to the near-mysticism of the local preacher, played by Rod Steiger).
When performing their version of the song on their album The Two Sides of the Smothers Brothers, Tom Smothers continually sings, "I don't care, and I don't care...", and when Dick Smothers tells him those aren't the lyrics, Tom replies, "I don't care."
In the Bizarro comic strip in the newspapers, a sheriff brings a little kid whose jersey reads "Jimmy" on the back up to a man's doorway. He tells the man, "I caught this little rascal crackin' your corn again." The man, holding a banjo, says, "How many times I gotta tell you, sheriff? I DON'T CARE!"
The song raised some controversy when a small part of it was used in a December, 2006 Cingular Wireless commercial, in which the visible half of a phone conversation was talking to someone named "Jim" and was calling him by any variant of "Jim" that he could think of ("Jimbo", "Jimmy boy", "Jimmy crack corn..."). It was subsequently edited out because of several complaints. Cingular stated that they received a "half dozen complaints", but did not want to offend anybody who thought the commercial was inappropriate.
Tom Lehrer's satirical "The Folk Song Army" contains this lyric:
There are innocuous folk songs
But we regard 'em with scorn
The folks who sing 'em have no social conscience,
Why they don't even care if Jimmy crack corn
A mondegreen on the refrain: "Gimme that corn and I don't care, the master's throwing it away."
Allan Sherman included a parody version of the song as the first entry in "Shticks and Stones" on his album "My Son, the Folk Singer":
Oh, salesmen come and salesmen go,
And my best one has gone, I know;
And if he don't come back to me,
I'll have to close the factory!
Gimme Jack Cohn, and I don't care,
Gimme Jack Cohn, and I don't care;
Gimme Jack Cohn, and I don't care,
But at best he's gone away!
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